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A Russian test of a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon has created a field of around 1,500 pieces of space debris, putting global systems and even the International Space Station at risk, the US government confirmed Monday afternoon.

For hours Monday, the Pentagon was careful not to confirm anything as rumors swirled — and expert sleuths poured over data — about Russia having knowingly created a new debris field by destroying on of its satellites. One military source told Breaking Defense it “looks like” the debris was caused by a ground-launched missile; that same source claimed around 1,500 pieces of debris have now been thrown wildly into orbit.

That debris figure, as well as Russia’s role in the situation, was officially confirmed by State Department spokesman Ned Price, who said “Russia’s dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long term sustainability of our space and clearly demonstrates that Russia’s claims of opposing the weapons and weaponization of space are disingenuous and hypocritical.”

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The New York Times has now published its fourth story on the investigation of James O’Keefe and Project Vertitas in connection with their possession of the diary of Ashley Biden. The otherwise questionable authenticity of the diary can be inferred from the involvement of the FBI. It has somehow become a federal case in the Age of Biden.

Today’s story is “Project Veritas Tells Judge It Was Assured Biden Diary Was Legally Obtained.” Subhead: “But a search warrant in the case suggests the Justice Department believes the diary kept by the president’s daughter Ashley Biden was stolen.” The story is by Times reporters Michael Schmidt and Adam Goldman with the assistance of researchers Susan C. Beachy and Matthew Cullen. That amounts to four cooks in the kitchen to produce what turns out to be thin gruel.

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People in California, take note.

(Ponder a 1400 square-foot house that looks like a sawed-off Quonset hut but costs $350,000.)

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No clue as to how much they’ll cost. I suspect it won’t be cheap.

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I rather suspect that it will be a wholly-electric car, which is a deal breaker for me. (Unless they crack the fusion power plant problem.)

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If you’ve got wind, you’ve got power.

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My friend who reads the New York Times alerted me to this article about rural America’s continued movement away from the Democratic party. I’m glad he did. The article is well worth reading.

The most noteworthy thing about the Times’ piece is the numbers it presents from Virginia:

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The company’s move comes as other gun makers have been ditching the northeast amid growing hostility there and moving to more politically welcoming states.

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A northern California town has declared itself a “constitutional republic” in response to Covid-19 health restrictions imposed by the governor, in the latest sign of strife between the state’s government and its rural and conservative regions.

The city council in Oroville, located at the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills about 90 miles from the capital of Sacramento, adopted a resolution this week stating it would oppose state and federal orders it deems to be government overreach.

Oroville leaders said the designation was a way of affirming the city’s values and pushing back against state rules it doesn’t agree with, although a legal expert said the designation was merely a gesture and did not grant the city any new authority.

And the sheep push back.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Imagine being able to design a new organism as easily as you can design a new integrated circuit. That’s the ultimate vision behind the computer-aided design (CAD) program being developed by the GP-write consortium.

“We’re taking the same things we’d do for design automation in electronics, and applying them to biology,” says Doug Densmore, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University. One of Densmore’s startups, Lattice Automation, is leading the effort to develop the CAD. He says the first version will be available by the end of the year.

One of Densmore’s hopes for the project is that it will help computer scientists see a way to get involved in genetics and biology. “There are some really brilliant computer scientists out there, who might say, ‘I don’t get what this is doing biologically, but I like the coding,’” he notes.

Be the first on your block….

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Metafabric is the latest development in a broader emerging field of textiles for personal heat management, clothing that can heat or cool the wearer. Researchers hope that these textiles will not only enhance personal comfort, but reduce injury and death from extreme heat. They might even help slow climate change by reducing the need for air-conditioning and heating, which accounts for about 10 percent of global electricity consumption.

Paul Mirengoff from Power Line.

Loudoun County, Virginia seems to have become the epicenter of the school policy battle within our culture wars. Events from that county are also playing a role in the upcoming Virginia gubernatorial election — at least I hope they will. This post is about two developments from Loudoun County that have been reported elsewhere, but may have escaped widespread notice.

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Some people are born with hearing loss, while others acquire it with age, infections or long-term noise exposures. In many instances, the tiny hairs in the inner ear’s cochlea that allow the brain to recognize electrical pulses as sound are damaged. As a step toward an advanced artificial cochlea, researchers in ACS Nano report a conductive membrane, which translated sound waves into matching electrical signals when implanted inside a model ear, without requiring external power.

 

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A team of engineers working on Twitter’s own ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) unit scraped millions of tweets of thousands of elected officials from seven different countries: US, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, and France. They tracked how likely these posts made between 1 April 2020 and 15 August 2020 were to be placed in a higher rank in users’ personal Twitter feeds using Twitter’s algorithms.

Tweets posted by politicians from right-wing parties were amplified more than those from left-wing parties in all countries except Germany. The effect was strongest for Canadian and British politics. For example, content from UK Labour MPs was amplified 112 per cent as opposed to the 176 per cent amplification of Conservative MPs’ content; and Canada’s Liberal party politicos were amplified 43 per cent versus 167 per cent for the Canadian Conservative party.

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What happens is that his negatively charged material absorbs hydrogen. When light passes through it, the polarity of the bonds changes to positive, and the hydrogen is released. That’s a much better process than compressing hydrogen to 5,000 psi up to 10,000 psi, as today’s fuel cells need. For example, the Toyota Mirai holds 5.5 kg of hydrogen at that pressure.

This material Plasma Kinetics developed can be used as a disc or as a film that is just one-tenth of a thickness of a human hair. At first, the discs helped the company to explain the technology: hydrogen would be released when the laser hit it as a compact disc would “release music” when the laser reader hit it. However, the nano graphite film proved to be a better means to deal with hydrogen storage.

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Western Maryland state lawmakers have sent letters to officials in West Virginia, asking them to “consider adding us as constituent counties to the State of West Virginia.”

“We believe this arrangement may be mutually beneficial for both states and for our local constituencies,” the lawmakers wrote in the letters, which were sent earlier this month and released publicly on Thursday. The letter was signed by five Republican lawmakers who represent Maryland’s three westernmost counties: Garrett, Allegany and Washington.

It wasn’t immediately clear exactly what legal steps would need to be accomplished in order to make such a switch, but there would likely be many hurdles ahead.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Ponder the fact that nobody is trying to develop meat that tastes like plants.

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A new optical switch is, at 1 trillion operations per second, between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today’s leading commercial electronic transistors, research that may one day help lead to a new generation of computers based on light instead of electricity, say scientists in Russia and at IBM.

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Leptin is a hormone produced by fat cells that carries out a range of functions in the body, chief among them being the regulation of appetite. It does by communicating with the brain region called the hypothalamus to let the person know they’ve had enough to eat, but this relationship can break down in people with obesity.

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California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, “low-cost” one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water.

Cue Eco-Nazi lawsuits.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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A new book titled “Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and Its Demise” by Greek historian and ecopolitical theorist Evaggelos Vallianatos seeks to unravel the mystery of the world’s first computer.

I’m not sure I’m willing to waste money on a book by an ‘ecopolitical theorist’. I’ll wait for an actual scientist.

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Like us, chefs only have so much energy and working memory at their disposal. Chefs use mise-en-place – a philosophy and mindset embodied in a set of practical techniques – as an “external brain.” It gives them a way to externalize their thinking into their environment and automate the repetitive parts of cooking so they can focus completely on the creative parts.

…

In this article, I’ll summarize what I believe to be the most important lessons we can immediately put to use in knowledge-intensive work today.

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In the new study, published Oct. 14 in the journal Science, researchers uncovered a previously unknown repair mechanism that kicks in after a run on the treadmill. Striking images show how, shortly after the exercise concludes, nuclei scuttle toward tears in the muscle fibers and issue commands for new proteins to be built, in order to seal the wounds. That same process likely unfolds in your own cells in the hours after you return home from the gym.

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While other water generators based on similar technology require high ambient humidity and low temperatures to function effectively, Veiga’s machines work in temperatures of up to 40 Celsius (104F) and can handle humidity of between 10% and 15%.

A small machine can produce 50-75 litres a day, and be easily carried on a trolley, but bigger versions can produce up to 5,000 litres a day.

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Created by Brazilian developer Alan Pégoli, ‘Laundry Lens’ launched a year ago and it’s really simple to use. Just point your camera to the tag on the clothes you want to wash and it will say whether you should take some caution when using the washing machine, iron, or drying it clean.

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If you purchase a Framework Laptop, you’re buying both a capable computer right now and a promise of something remarkable in the future. Cracking the Framework Laptop open for the first time, you’ll find a well-organized and well-labeled set of parts, every one replaceable. If the promise works out, you have an heirloom laptop that’s repairable and upgradable for a decade. If Framework—the company making the Framework Laptop—fails, you might replace it in a few years, as you would any other laptop.

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The quick fix of coal gasification and CO2 storage is all but dead. Projects will continue, and the subsidies will flow if Biden gets his way. But it is greenwashing and greenwasting.

The shiny star to be, Plant Ratcliffe, better known as the Kemper Project, a $6.7 billion integrated gasification power plant, was an experimental boondoggle from the start (mid-2010).

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By uprooting carbon trapped in soil, wild pigs are releasing around 4.9 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually across the globe, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars.

An international team led by researchers from The University of Queensland and The University of Canterbury have used predictive population models, coupled with advanced mapping techniques to pinpoint the climate damage wild pigs are causing across five continents.

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Dozens of viruses don’t use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this is possible—and perhaps more common than we think.

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They’d be fools not to.

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Able to leap tall metaphors with a single bound….

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The researchers also have shown that transplanting dysbiotic gut microbiota from a hypertensive animal into a normotensive (having a healthy blood pressure) one results in the recipient developing high blood pressure.

“This result told us that gut dysbiosis is not just a consequence of hypertension, but is actually involved in causing it,” Durgan said. “This ground work led to the current study in which we proposed to answer two questions. First, can we manipulate the dysbiotic microbiota to either prevent or relieve hypertension? Second, how are the gut microbes influencing the animal’s blood pressure?”

The sad fact is that most people would rather be fat than hungry.

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Harnessing the ability of natural killer cells within our own immune system, researchers at Canada’s McMaster University have developed a new form of cancer immunotherapy.

The team engineered natural killer cells to not only attack cancerous cells — including in solid tumors, a problem for some other kinds of immunotherapy — that also to distinguish between those malignant cells and healthy cells that only look like them.

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Without lithium, the all-electric vehicles of today wouldn’t be feasible, and with an increasing demand for EVs expected to exhaust reserves on land by 2080, this might become inevitable. But there is another way to extract the vital element, or rather another place.

The oceans contain roughly 5,000 times more lithium than land, but at unconscionably small concentrations of roughly 0.2 parts per million (ppm). And a team of researchers has developed a new system capable of extracting concentrated lithium from seawater, according to a recent study published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Washington Free Beacon.

According to a Washington Free Beacon analysis, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the bald weirdo. Of the 14 Senate Democrats seeking reelection, two are completely hairless on top. Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) are both running in swing states, where they must win if Democrats are to have any shot at holding their slim majority in the Senate.

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Solar Water Solutions (SWS), a Finnish water technology company, has come as close as anyone to being able to offer the world essentially unlimited fresh water through its unique, zero-emissions, zero-running cost, and non-polluting desalination technology.

Now it’s being deployed, thanks to backing from the Dutch group Climate Fund Managers, in Kitui County, Kenya as part of a long-term goal to provide water for 400,000 rural Kenyans by 2023.

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Of course Taiwan knows the beaches likely to be used for an invasion. You’d want to install beach obstacles to make a landing difficult. But you wouldn’t call them that. How about an artificial reef program? Taiwan has been building artificial reefs for decades. Guess where? (Google it.)

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In case you care. (I don’t.)

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Reporting their findings today in the journal Nature Catalysis, the team say the results could revolutionise water disinfection technologies and present an unprecedented opportunity to provide clean water to communities that need it most.

Their new method works by using a catalyst made from gold and palladium that takes in hydrogen and oxygen to form hydrogen peroxide – a commonly used disinfectant that is currently produced on an industrial scale.

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Any chance they will leave him there?

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Singapore will thus have air filtration and UV sanitization in the airport before we have it in the hospitals.

Is the future slipping away from the United States? It seems that way sometimes. Only the high-tech sector is keeping us afloat and, of course, that is under attack by the elites.

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Researchers at Université de Montréal and McGill University have discovered a new multi-enzyme complex that reprograms metabolism and overcomes “cellular senescence,” when aging cells stop dividing.

In their study published on September 16, 2021, in Molecular Cell, the researchers show that an enzyme complex named HTC (hydride transfer complex) can inhibit cells from aging.

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A scientist has invented a material that reflects the sun’s rays off rooftops, and even absorbs heat from homes and buildings and radiates it away. And — get this — it is made from recyclable paper.

…

Yi Zheng, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, calls his material “cooling paper.”

He hopes that people everywhere will wrap their houses in the cooling paper one day, reports Good News Network. In addition to the cooling benefits, the paper doesn’t require any electricity, and it is 100% recyclable.

The paper can reduce a room’s temperature by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a radical but effective alternative to today’s air conditioners, which consume a lot of power.

Ten degrees doesn’t help much with a Texas summer. Perhaps this will be useful in Florida or California.

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Plywood frames use thin sheets of plywood [0] as the material for the entire structural system. Sheets of plywood are run through a CNC router, which cuts the plywood into specially designed shapes. The shapes are then attached together using slots and tabs (helped into place with large mallets) to form a variety of structural elements – walls, box beams, portal frames, columns – which then get assembled (using more slots, tabs, clips, and wedges) to form the superstructure of the building. The tight tolerances of the machined plywood mean that everything fits snugly together, which allows simple friction connections to do a great deal of the work (though in practice most of the folks using the system are throwing in some mechanical fasteners as well).

The problem is that most building codes are written by people in the building trades and are written to provide people in the building trades with guaranteed employment.

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Combining elements of the space and arms races of the Cold War, the drone race will be a flurry of innovation and acquisition efforts. Different, however, is the wide array of competitors. Arms transfers from rogue regimes make drone technology accessible to jihadists such as ISIS and Boko Haram, while the shrinking cost of production will catapult China into the lead. While the technology comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes—from the aptly named high-flying “Global Hawk” to compact suicide drones—winning the drone wars will likely come down to finding a common platform versatile enough to carry an array of weapons and surveillance capabilities.

As Frantzman reveals, the use of drones has gone beyond its deployment in the war on terror. A September 2019 attack on a Saudi oil field by Iranian drones revealed the lethal effectiveness of a “drone swarm,” in which hundreds of devices bomb a facility in unison and are difficult to strike down all t once. Future swarm attacks could be even more devastating with the inclusion of artificial intelligence technology, which better allows drones to communicate with each other. In their book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis and veteran Elliot Ackerman envision Chinese drones swarming U.S. ships in the South China Sea. That future may be closer than you think.

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But you will still need to use mosquito repellent because if you don’t you’re a danger to everyone else.

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A key “Stop the Steal” attorney who tried, on Donald Trump’s behalf, to convince former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to help execute a coup and overturn the 2020 election is helping a group of Michigan poll challengers sue voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems.

And according to newly filed court documents, that Trumpist attorney, Kurt Olsen, is teaming up with celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a longtime Democrat who served on former President Trump’s legal defense for the 2020 impeachment trial. Dershowitz said in a brief interview on Friday afternoon that though he is not the lead attorney on this new class-action lawsuit, he described himself as an “adviser and consultant on the First Amendment issues of this case.”